A selection of food served at the Kangnam BBQ Sports Bar & Grill.
There was a time when the words “all you can eat” triggered Pavlovian drooling in me, but these days I’m more likely to dry-heave at the thought. Even so, I can see why all-you-can-eat buffets have a dark allure, especially right before Thanksgiving.
My distaste for buffets came from the simple realization that they simply offer vast quantities of lousy food. I could stuff my gullet with all the low-rent mashed potatoes and Chinese food it could hold, or I could order takeout and not spend the night on a toilet.
But buffets can’t all be bad, right? Surely, there must be a good buffet somewhere, perhaps even in College Park. With that in mind, I set off on a trip into the heart of darkness to try to find a good all-you-can-eat buffet in College Park.
Sakura Seafood and Supreme Buffet
A Chinese buffet obviously had to figure somewhere into this exercise in gluttony. Chinese food has become so ingrained into my notion of buffets that to not at least try one would be heresy. I had to choose between China Buffet and Sakura Seafood and Supreme Buffet. I ended up selecting the latter because of its higher Yelp score and because the word “supreme” felt like a taunt.
Upon entering the buffet, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. Sakura is pretty much the canonical crappy Chinese buffet. If there were a circle of hell for buffet haters, it would look a lot like the dingy, dimly lit interior of Sakura.
The key with this kind of buffet is it offers the illusion of choice. The first thing you see past the cashier is rows upon rows of food being kept warm on steam tables. The first second after grabbing a plate, you’re filled with a giddy Christmas-morning rush. You could get the General Tso’s chicken, the honey barbeque chicken or … the chicken with mushrooms.
Ennui settles in as soon as you realize they’re all basically the same thing covered in different styles of goop. To Sakura’s credit, sushi and a hibachi grill are included in the price.
That credit, however, disappeared the instant I bit down on a California roll. Stale rice in sushi? Blasphemy.
I might be being too harsh on Sakura. The food is mostly functional, and I didn’t get food poisoning despite tempting fate and trying some of its seafood dishes. This wasn’t the place to convince me a good buffet can exist, but it is a place that offers a lot of food for $7.99.
Kangnam BBQ
Kangnam BBQ started offering a lunch buffet special that piqued my interest. Some of the better buffets I have visited were Korean-run sushi joints with a weird mix of Korean comfort food and decent sushi.
While Kangnam didn’t have the sushi buffet when I visited, I did try its normal lunch buffet. There were two options for the lunch buffet: the standard all-you-can-eat table or the all-you-can-eat buffet plus an order of Korean barbeque.
I opted for the former, if only because having a made-to-order component of an all-you-can-eat meal seemed perverse. First impressions were promising in a counterintuitive way: Kangnam’s buffet selection consists of a single table of dishes and some side dishes.
After Sakura’s greasy orgy of awful food, this seemed like a far more appealing setup. The dishes offered were tasty, though not hugely exciting.
Various soups, fried fish, spicy chicken, fried dumplings, stir-fry rice cakes, stir-fry noodles, fried rice, tofu and broccoli constituted the bulk of the offerings, with the stir-fry rice cakes and stir-fry noodles looking suspiciously similar to one another.
The side dishes table, on the other hand, was pretty fantastic. I have an immense love of the freebie Korean banchan offered at most Korean barbeque joints, so the opportunity to indulge in all-you-can-eat kimchi was an exciting prospect.
Kangnam’s buffet is a step in the right direction, but it ultimately didn’t pass the most fundamental test. At $9.95 a person, I would have rather just ordered off of its normal lunch menu.
Food Factory
Calling Food Factory minimalistic would be an understatement. Food Factory, from its purely functional name to the plastic, disposable silverware, is the epitome of no-frills. It resembles a halal butcher or deli more than it does a restaurant.
Yet its lunch buffet wound up providing a happy ending to this tale of morbid overconsumption. Yes, Food Factory actually has a good buffet!
Like Kangnam, Food Factory’s buffet comprises a manageable set of offerings. As soon as you pay up, you get a lovely piece of warm, soft naan bread. Past that, you have the choice of two kinds of rice, meat curry, okra curry, beans, chickpeas, something that looks like spinach, something that looks like eggplant, freshly grilled kabobs and a tiny salad bar.
The kabobs are the star of the show — juicy, tender and wonderfully flavorful. All-you-can-eat kabobs would be worth the $7.99 alone. The other dishes, however, are all tasty and pair excellently with the rice.
The humility of Food Factory is, perhaps, the key to its success. Kangnam’s offerings also skewed toward home-style dishes, but Food Factory thrives where Kangnam fails in offering a genuinely excellent component as part of the buffet.
Food Factory’s result: a relaxed, comforting experience where you have ample opportunity to explore the choices offered without feeling compelled to overeat.
